Elizabeth Judd is a freelance writer and book reviewer with an M.F.A. in English from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Yale. In this essay, she discusses Garcia's exploration of how personal and national histories shape the characters' destinies in The Agüero Sisters.

For Constancia and Reina Agüero, two sisters struggling to come to terms with the histories of their countries and their families, the truth is slippery, something that's been fractured by lies. History is in the eye of the teller, and facts are far from stable. Like other Cuban Americans, Garcia herself is used to radically different interpretations of the same event. In the Los Angeles Times, she said, "All of my mother's family stayed in Cuba by choice. My mother was the only one who came. All of my father's family decided to come to the United...